# HackGreenville Events Bot

2023

[Project site](https://github.com/hackgvl/slack-events-bot)

I joined the awesome HackGreenville community in 2020 (gosh, it's been so long now) and it's really been so amazing to be part of such a vibrant local tech community. [Jim Ciallela](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimciallella/) and many others had been tirelessly maintaining searchable and queryable data about local groups and events for years before I joined, but I noticed that most of that incredibly valuable data had been siloed on the official HackGreenville website, and not easily accessible to the main community on Slack (with ~2000 members).

While the HackGreenville Slack had an `#events` channel for posting events, this channel required community organizers to manually post their events every week, which placed an extra burden on community organizers, and would miss community organizers that weren't as involved in the HG community as well.

With the HG community's permission (through a very organized and democratic poll), I created a Slack bot that would use the publicly available HackGreenville API to create a weekly post of all the upcoming tech events in the Upstate, that people could easily view and hopefully, attend! I intentionally started small with a simple bot written in Python, hoping to make it easy and accessible to contributors, and since then, many contributors including the amazing [Matthew Thornton](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-t-965703162/) have helped to expand the bot with very helpful features, such as post pagination (due to Slack's character limits), better formatting, and more!

 Since 2023, the Slack bot has been continuously running, helping to improve event turnout and community involvement. I'm currently in the process of helping to migrate the bot's functionality into the central HackGreenville website, so that we can have a more cohesive experience and help power extended features like [Bogdan Kharchenko](https://www.linkedin.com/in/bogdan-kharchenko/)'s [configurable calendar feeds](https://hackgreenville.com/calendar-feed), and hopefully future anticipated features like regular email & text notifications, and more!